January 28, 2010

“Why is SVN so slow?”

I recently migrated a client from CVS to Subversion for his doc repository. I considered mailing this out after hearing a few complaints about speed (the repo is >1GB in size), but then decided to not send it.

All,

If you suffer from slow updates on Windoze, the following TortoiseSVN FAQ articles may offer a few insights:

The key argument is that SVN due to its support for atomic transactions needs to do many more file operations than CVS in order to ensure integrity. This makes it slower than CVS, especially if there is an on-access virus scanner involved.

I’m keeping this on file here, just in case. 😉

P.S.: “Why not git?” – Because GIT has a 3-step commit process (add, commit, push) that is not justifiable for this application. The cool people (like me) use git-svn anyway.